Tlamelo Phetlhu and Sam Lubbe, University of Zululand, South Africa

The traditional models of electronic data interchange (EDI) and out-of-application methods for messaging and collaborations are not suitable to achieve the full benefits of VEASC because of multiple limitations. The limitations are: multiple human interventions, lack of real time visibility into the supply chain flows, inability to accurately synchronise the demand and supplyside information, and inability to build dynamic capabilities required for facing supply chain dynamics. The existing studies about deploying supply chain applications on cloud computing are focussed on overcoming these limitations through service-oriented architectures and their components. However, their focus needs to be expanded to virtual enterprise architecture modelling to overcome the limitations of EDI and out-of-application methods effectively. The virtual enterprise architecture supply chain (VEASC) model has been studied in this research employing Optimised Networking (OPNET) modelling and simulations of a commercial application called INTEND. The simulation results reflect a potential to overcome the limitations of traditional EDI and out-of-application methods. However, the true potential of the proposed system and the changes needed to automatically recover from failures can be determined after testing actual transactions in a real world VEASC implementation.

Supply chain, enterprise architecture, integration, collaboration, communications, strategic partnership, cloud computing, Optimised Networking (OPNET), modelling, simulations, simple object access protocol (SOAP), eXtensible Markup Language (XML)